The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows Things. About Cities. And how they work.

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows that cities run like little clockworks, and that if People Would Just Do As He Says, cities and every service, space, or interaction in them would be So Much Better;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room spends a lot of time on the internet sending dumb wimmins and Joel Kotkin emails and tweets that start that out with “Actually…Teh Facts Are…” that usually involve cherrypicked statistics he got from Another Smart Boy Urbanist;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows what bicyclists need, all bicyclists, everywhere, and what they need is Amsterdam. He knows what women bicyclists need, too, because Amsterdam;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room can give a two-hour long lecture on the GM Streetcar conspiracy;

Teasing out romance from reality seems the most undesirable exercise when it comes to Ireland. A long memory for loss, tyranny, and tragedy, laced together over time with whiskey and poetry — why unravel that? But the romance lingers over the less savory parts of Irish culture as well, such as often unflinching support of the IRA by Irish America, long past when it was beneficial to the future of Ireland; the grip of the Church; and the idolatry of too much booze. Not to mention problems with objectifying any one culture – on the other side of the coin where the flattering impressions lie are the more insidious ones, both bereft of nuance. I’ve often tried to reconcile my love for so many things Irish with how I feel when a Gentile loves a Jew (not as in one individual gentile or Jew, a general love and admiration for the People), imbuing the object of desire with a mythical historical aura extending far beyond the one individual. So is it ok if I treat the Irish with a similar embrace? A self-conscious one, but still, I am not of them. I am very aware of how I caught the bug, and for that I blame Irish-Americans. It’s hard growing up in Rockaway and not internalizing the romance of the Irish Diaspora, and as a recent arrival from a totally foreign culture, in 3rd grade, trying to fit in, and ultimately assimilating in unpredictable ways.

I’ve taken my Irish homework pretty seriously, and after years of reading, listening, watching, I finally made the pilgrimage. My two weeks there took me to Dublin, Belfast, Ballina, Galway and Inishmore and not long after I wrote an article about two new books about the Famine. My cocktail party conversation at this time was a bit monomaniacal. But thankfully diving deeply, very deeply, into the Irish past, and traveling through its present, has helped add missing layers of history and perspective.

Along with achieving a more nuanced understanding of Ireland, I’ve finally reflected on my blinkered romanticization of the Roman Catholic Church, it hasn’t helped me in life that some of my favorite writers converted, similarly possessed with the mystical aesthetic of the church, though as an atheist the aesthetic part is foremost for me, for them, an already heightened sense of sin, guilt, fear and sanctity led. I have less than a socially acceptable intolerance of religious Judaism, and yet, with the Church, I’ve dismissed the “bad” parts as antiquated vestiges that hardly matter. But they truly still do, and with abortion, homosexuality, the non-ordination of women, and celibacy of priests, not to mention the abuse, there is much I should not ignore as having already passed. Seeing the movie Philomena recently with remembering the very real and very common negative aspects of the church’s past, and also Ireland’s (Magdalene Sisters certainly helped with that as well). Edna O’Brien’s memoir spends most of its first third in less than morally liberated Irish territory. There was a reason O’Brien and others fled to freedom when they could, at that time. Though O’Brien’s recollections of her time in a convent school were also quite lovely, especially her descriptions of one nun she and most of the other girls were quietly in love with. There is so much to hold on to in O’Brien’s book, and her writing epitomizes that rare natural talent for economy of words, and which stories to leave in, which to leave out. I was tempted to put down the book at the point when she finally arrives as a full fledged success and enters all the right circles in London and New York, but her story-telling defies any semblance of gossip or highlighted glamor (or at least savors them in just the right way); her descriptions of Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth, and so many others, are sharp and often sweet. I might recommend staying away from her novels if you are a single woman though. Mostly because she nails it. Especially how girls, and the more guileless among us, fumble our way towards womanhood, after much wisdom is gained. Too much wisdom.

And, an antidote to Ben Affleck, and the rest of Hollywood’s, love for Southie and other similar Irish American caricatures, is Alice McDermott. Charming Billy especially. But all of her work takes up Irish America, and it is a long thoughtful look each time, without diminishing the charm and pride that Ben Affleck also loves.

The Super 8 seems to have been invented to capture the nostalgia of unchastened idealism and youth. When Richard Nixon entered the oval office in 1969, he brought with him a small team of young, ardent acolytes – Dwight Chapin, HR (“Bob”) Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman –who came equipped with their Super 8’s, obsessively filming everything for posterity, for history to hold witness to how they changed the world. A recent documentary, “Our Nixon”, uses footage from these reels to show us the tragic trajectory of these bright, young men, who entered the White House with sincere if somewhat naïve ambitions and convictions, and ended up in prison, co-conspirators in an affair that traumatized a nation and helped undermine the sanctity of the American presidency.

Much like the Nixon tapes, unsealed to the public in 2011, these home movies – 500 reels only recently released by the National Archives – let us peer into the machinations and idiosyncrasies of Nixon and his inner circle. There are few presidents who continue to elicit such a morbid curiosity and desire to climb inside another’s head, to understand how and when Nixon’s ambition and distrust of “the liberals”, Vietnam protesters, and the New York Times and Washington Post, turned into delusional paranoia, lies and criminal acts. A few years ago, the English playwright, Peter Morgan, wrote a play and movie Frost/Nixon, which revisited this fixation with Nixon’s states of mind, his understanding of his own guilt and the motivations for his actions. “Our Nixon” does something similar, and casts a wider net, giving a fuller picture that includes those who worked around Nixon and very much enabled and abetted him.

The almost campy home movies, of the groundbreaking trip to China, nervous backstage smiles at the inauguration, a meeting with the pope in Rome, sitting with the President as he watched on television the landing on the moon and phoned to congratulate Neil Armstrong, dignitary dinner parties, and Sunday poolside idylls, give us a gauzy view of Eden before the fall. We see genuine camaraderie and sense of purpose, an eagerness to capture every moment of this great long ride into changing the world.

As a poignant counterpoint, the film uses archival footage from the era and from subsequent interviews with the three men, after their terms in prison for their roles in Watergate, when famous talk show hosts, such as David Frost and Mike Wallace, asked the questions on everybody’s mind. The ambition and lack of any real healthy skepticism or irony glimpsed in the home movies come through for Haldeman and Chapin especially, who even in the latter day interviews seem to sincerely believe they were on the side of right. In one interview, in the early 1980’s, when asked about the crimes of Watergate, Chapin says, “I just don’t see it that way,” that is was some kind of a “sinister era of criminality” or that people in the Nixon White House were trying to “rape the country of its democracy.” Mike Wallace and other interviewers’ questions are often delivered with explicit incredulity and indignation – everyone seemed to take Watergate as a personal betrayal.

Nixon did also employ more skeptical and world wise advisors, including Henry Kissinger and Leonard Garment, the latter a liberal Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn who has just passed away and was for years assumed to be the real identity of Deep Throat because of his more sophisticated and less dogmatic attachment to President Nixon. Both provided a dimension to the administration that seems significantly missing from the inner circle portrayed in the film. It wasn’t a completely isolated echo-chamber filled with lackeys. But Nixon, from within a thickening fog of paranoia, increasingly only listened to those most keen to please him, his trio of young men. They would continue to prop up his growing angers and delusions, and perhaps before they realized it, he would ask them to resign for doing just that.

While the film does not offer any new insight into “what actually happened,” nor intend to, it does provide a portrait of young, ambitious, unfettered ideas about power and government and the role of the president, and much in the film resonates with power and policy today. But it also importantly, reminds us, both through these men and the event of the day, that the late 60’s to early 70’s marked an era of so much shattered idealism and seemed to have ushered in a more cynical resentful political dynamic. Watergate, and these three men, embodied both the heady idealism and its near total destruction.

The JFK assassination, whether we have collectively willed it into an event more history-altering than it really was (check out this piece from The Daily Beast, about the anniversary and Boomer Narcissism), or if it truly was the moment when America’s exuberant, youthful rush into the future veered off course and fell through a tear in time, was of course, the subject of much speculation this past November (and always — but is it because of the Boomers?).

In his novel 11/22/63, King’s protagonist, a burnt out English teacher named George, living in a small town in contemporary Maine, finds a portal into the past (a real one, in the back of a diner soon to close to make way for a new LL Bean), to the year 1959. The owner of the diner, now dying, shares the fact of its existence with George and implores George to complete a task he was unable to himself – go through the portal, find Lee Harvey Oswald, figure out whether he “did it” and stop the assassination, thereby apparently also stopping the turbulence, death and destruction of the 1960’s and the war in Vietnam with this one act. Like all King books, this one is compulsively readable, absorbing and scary, the tension of violence about to erupt following you through to the end. At first it might seem too full of the neat tricks of Back to The Future – where we get to see how it all looked and sounded back then. But it becomes much more than its conceit and is immensely satisfying. George, and the reader, soon see that apart from what seemed to be the main narrative (the historical one and this book’s) there is daily violence, the kind that shatters “lesser” lives, of people George finds himself suddenly close to in his quest to change history; while these lives are seemingly less significant to history, they are not less important to want and try to “fix” if one could go back in time and do so. And for the history buffs, spending time with Lee and Marina and their milieu is as creepy as any King parallel reality.

In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties

Lawrence Wright

Long before the looming 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination (or my awareness of it anyway) I was looking for a nonfiction book about growing up in America as it came of age to its present age. I finally landed on Lawrence Wright’s In The New World and it ended up being a crash course in Dallas, where he grew up before he made his escape to Tulane in New Orleans (his word, Chapter 6 is titled “Escape”; at the moment, Wright’s current book about Scientology is making all the lists, but this book seems so much more interesting and significant to me – the 100 page New Yorker article about Scientology was plenty no?).

I had really only vague ideas about Dallas, probably wrapped up in impressions of Texas as a whole; a certain East Coast notion of Dallas as a land of new money, many churches and deeply conservative and rigid ideas of the way life ought to be. Wright, of course, gives more context, and illustrates, through the telling of Dallas’ modern history, much that resonated strongly about modern America’s trajectory as well:

It was not just Dallas, of course. New cities were forming, cities without traditions, with only the blind instinct to grow, to add wealth. Already in the fifties the urban centers of the Northeast had begun their long decline. A great migration was taking was taking place, out of Boston, for instance, which lost 13 percent of its population in the fifties; and New York, which diminished by one hundred thousand people; and Cleveland and Providence; all of them great industrial centers, union towns, politically liberal. A million immigrants settled in the newly built suburban tracts surrounding Phoenix, San Diego, Albuquerque, Orlando, Los Angeles, Houston…What distinguished Dallas from the other cities of the new world (this was the legend we told ourselves) was that there was no reason for its existence. It did not float atop an ocean of oil; there was no seaport, no mighty river; there were no paper mills or coal mines…Dallas had pressed itself into existence through force of will and public relations…a city finally of commerce, information, and trade, self-created like no other city in the world.

And further on in the book:

The prevailing ethic in the city was not hard work but high risk…Anyone who worked too hard to make money or who seemed to be too cautious in holding on to it was regarded as a drudge or a scrooge. Money was supposed to be inconsequential, and although our millionaires didn’t light their cigars with fifty-dollar bills like Daddy Warbucks did, they enjoyed wasting their money, buying up entire store window displays from Neiman Marcus, or his-and-hers submarines.

The most extreme conservative views were bankrolled and openly condoned by some of Dallas’ most prominent citizens, including “the richest man in the world” – H.L. Hunt, a neighbor of the author, who lived in a replica of Mt. Vernon and who hired former FBI agent Dan Smoot to serve as his mouthpiece, on a radio show called Life Line. Some favorite topics for the show were the “enemies within” (Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Edward R. Murrow, Earl Warren) and the impeachment of JFK. On the day of the assassination itself his newsletter editorialized, “that if Kennedy succeeded in his plan to communize America, we would find ourselves living in a country where ‘no firearms are permitted the people, because would then have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors.”

Most interesting and new to me though, was learning about just how painfully synonymous Dallas was, and still is to so many, with the assassination. I’m not sure how to explain that the word “Dallas” does not immediately (and only) invoke the assassination to me, except by way of suspecting it is a generational thing, much as “The War” means only one war to the baby boomers. But still, I was pretty astounded.

Friday Night Lights (Book, Movie, TV Show)

Before there was Dillon, there was Odessa. Friday Night Lights, the nonfiction book by H.G. Bissinger, is one of my favorite things I’ve read about Texas, about the oil boom and bust town of Odessa which suffered from all the follies, and lived high on all the speculative joys, of neighboring Midland. A near caricature of labor and capital. And being an East Coast city kid, it really did actually take this book, and this series (and a guy I met in an airport once who played for the coach FNL is based on, who even after breaking some serious bones that caused him to lose a scholarship and nearly all his mobility, still could not understand how every kid does not want to play football if he can) to finally get some sense of the mania of football and its role in the fabric of life of so many small towns and suburbs.

The show doesn’t need much more hype, except to say it is completely deserved and I can’t imagine any type of person who would not enjoy it (it has something for everyone, truly — I recommended it to my brother and his wife, who have rather divergent tastes, and I take great pride in the fact that they watched it together and loved it). Lorrie Moore wrote a great piece about it in the New York Review of Books, though I was pretty surprised to learn that “serious” folks considered it a “cultural guilty pleasure,” until, of course, they agreed together otherwise.

LBJ: The Passage of Power, Robert Caro

The latest volume in the Caro LBJ opus provides what may become the defining account of LBJ’s masterful legislative canny in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1965. But it is Johnson’s improbable entrance into the neutered role of Vice President that turns out to be one of the most fascinating case studies in those qualities that serve to both drive and keep back an individual. In this case a man with nearly superhuman tenacity and political energy that was fueled by fear that at other times held him hostage and nearly undermined his political career altogether.

LBJ grew up poor in the Texas Hill Country, but was not born into yet another generation of poverty. His mother came from a proud long lineage and projected high expectations onto her son. His father was an ambitious but ultimately failed politican and businessman. The failure of his father and his own consequent poverty instilled in LBJ an almost pathological fear of being powerless. (And certainly led his genuine determination to fight poverty in general). While this led him to become Master of the Senate, as Caro called Vol #3, it also, finally, when given the green light by the Democratic party to run for the office he had always coveted, kept him from tossing his hat in the ring until way too late. He was so petrified of losing and embarrassing himself, and being like the powerless loser he saw as father as, that he never even really tried.

The book also gives a detailed and at times incredible account of the assassination, and of LBJ’s steps to consolidate his power in the crucial hours and days after. His phonecall to Bobby Kennedy, made right after Bobby was crushed by the news of his brother’s death, to ensure Bobby would stand solidly behind LBJ’s presidency, was just one of the many steps LBJ took to harness the power of his new post. While somewhat cold blooded and calculating, it also, arguably had to be done. Someone had to think in the midst of the emotional turmoil, and ensure that the next president would not only be characterized by not being JFK.

In a piece posted in the new and sleek Turn On Art, I look at two works at the current ICP Triennial that explore the human instinct to impose meaning on the built environment. In those works, the artists played with perceptions of the city of Jerusalem — a place especially vulnerable to personal projections and shifting political realities.

Another series at the Triennial, titled “Ponte City,” does something similar. In three glowing light boxes measuring 152.4 x 50.2 inches each, “Ponte City” presents several reconfigurations of this iconic apartment building in Johannesburg. Built in 1976, in a society that worked quite hard to engineer its way toward a certain order (ICP recently held an exhaustive exhibit about photography during and after apartheid, which I wrote about here), this colossal construction of a 54-story luxury apartment building in the middle of Johannesburg could hardly withstand the aspirational projections of its architects. Like King Hussein’s unfinished palace in East Jerusalem, the grandiose plans of those in power quickly fell prey to political forces – facts on the ground competing.

Originally built for a central Johannesburg community that was white and well off, Ponte City saw its intended residents flee to the suburbs with the end of apartheid in 1994. In 2007, developers tried to recast their aspirations once again, this time attempting to lure middle class black professionals. But the project faltered, and after going bankrupt a year later, Ponte City was left to deteriorate, in many places still unfinished, unpainted, and partially occupied.

Between 2008 and 2010, South African Magnum photographer Mikhael Subotzky, known for his gritty prison projects (such as Beaufort West about Beaufort West Prison 2006-2008, and The Four Corners 2004, about the inmates of Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison where Nelson Mandella was incarcerated), and English artist Patrick Warehouse, set about to photograph every window, internal door, and television in Ponte City. The resulting three panels echo the scale of the building, and are thematically organized by television/window/door. They are a sort of excavation of an ongoing reality — uncovering the results of the past rather than the past itself, exposing how the building has resisted any one meaning from taking root.

Political and economic booms and busts have littered the landscape with monuments to often delusional aspirations. Along with visual testimonials such as those at ICP, several fictional and nonfictional works have provided especially poignant, and often quite tragic, investigations of what these developers leave behind once their funding has dried up. Tana French, the Irish writer known for her page-turning mysteries, has actually provided one of the best of these in Broken Harbor, a murder-mystery set in one of Ireland’s many ghost estates that sprang up during the boom and now serve only as haunting reminders of so much folly. And in his piece on Venezuela, Jon Lee Anderson writes about the failed city of Caracas by way of the Tower of David, the world’s tallest slum, originally intended as Venezuela’s answer to Wall St.

It is possible to raze bad ideas sometimes. But it is near impossible to foretell a building’s future, its place in society and whom it will ultimately serve. You can only will so much reality by building it.

(In a recent piecefor The Economist, I highlighted two new works that examine Detroit’s past, present and future. But Detroit’s problems are so complex, and the solutions so hard to see or understand, and I wanted to explore further. Here is a much longer version of that article, published here with the permission of The Economist).

CLINT EASTWOOD’S baffling conversation with an empty chair at the recent Republican Convention was not the first time this year that the aging actor stepped into the political spotlight. In the now famous Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler, Eastwood declares, “It’s Halftime in America.” He tells us, “How do we come from behind? Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And, what’s true about them is true about all of us.”

Detroit seems to represent many things to many people, often in hyperbolic terms — the death of America’s indutrial might, the worst kind of urban blight, intractable racial tension. But also the future of America, the future of cities, the future of the post-industrial world. That’s a lot to project onto one city.

A (Very) Brief History

Most people immediately associate Detroit’s downfall with the 1967 race riots that left the city burning and brought in the National Guard in tanks. However, its demise began long before, bred, in many ways, by the very conditions that made it the world’s fastest growing city in 1930. Henry Ford’s famous innovations and assembly lines in massive factories led to the quick profileration of other giant auto plants and related industries. The demand for mostly unskilled labor skyrocketed and presented a chance for the regular working man to finally make a decent wage and enter the middle class. Diego Rivera and other fellow travelers visited the factories in Detroit and spoke praises of a new workers’ paradise. (You can take a look at Rivera’s Detroit Industry fresco cycle here).

Along with immigrants and white Southerners, this promise of a good life appealed to so many Southern blacks who had been languishing in often dire poverty. The mass migration North began, into a city that was neither prepared to house all its new citizens nor to address the friction between the races and obvious racial inequities in hiring practices. The failure to effectively address these issues exacerbated already simmering racial tensions that only “resolved” themselves in the eventual white flight from the city and into the neighboring suburbs, taking most of the tax-base with it. Powerful unions that kept the working middle class thriving kept the lid on the pressure cooker for a while longer. But bad policy and racial politics, combined with a one-industry town manned by mostly unskilled labor, left Detroit woefully unprepared for globalization and American auto fading. It was a perfect and deadly storm. The world’s once most modern city suddenly seemed a crucible for the worst racial and economic issues plaguing America. Today, a city once bursting at the seams, has lost half its population, leaving so much of it (40 square miles out of 149) abandoned, slowly being reclaimed by the Midwestern prairie from which it sprang.

Ford Assembly Line

“Saving” Detroit

The effort to “save” Detroit and what remains of the American auto industry has played a prominent role in the political landscape the last few years and certainly in the upcoming presidential election. To let Detroit and Big Auto fail would seem too strong a statement about the still precarious economic recovery. Obama’s decision to bail out the big three auto makers in 2009 is a major part of his economic recovery platform. As he boasted at the Democratic National Convention, “Osama is dead, Detroit is not.” Mitt Romney, on the other hand, famously stated in a 2008 New York Times Op-Ed that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt.

Along with major government intervention in Detroit’s fate, a serious grassroots movement of artists, young entrepeneurs, urban planners and urban farmers has taken root in the city over the last few years. The cheap rent, empty arable land and the fading glory of a once grand city, has attracted a consistent and growing number of young people who very genuinely see the city as the new Brooklyn or Berlin, full of creative possibilities. It has attracted big names as well – Matthew Barney produced a major performance piece there that brought in big players in the art world; David Byrne apparently likes to bike around the city; and developer Tony Goldman, who famously revived Miami’s South Beach and New York’s Soho, visited and saw great potential. Much has been written about new and trendy Detroit– a 2011 article in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times about the new (mostly white) hipster class, was titled, “Detroit Pushes Back with Young Muscle. “

A more serious examination of these two competing narratives – Detroit as beyond salvation and Detroit as the future of post-industrial America – has been sorely needed. Two recent , excellent, works take on this task, and mostly succeed. “Detropia,” a documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, looks at the personal, political and phsyical landscape of the city. Mark Binelli’s book, “Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of An American Metropolis,” explores these themes in full, alternating between hard tragic truths and the new seductive air of optimism. There is almost too much material to mine.

In their beautiful and moving film, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, provide the kind of stark visuals and atmospherics that underpin all of the issues Detroit presents, never shying away from hard realities but also never judging. Ewing and Grady, best known for their 2006 film Jesus Camp, are astute observers of various aspects of the American condition. As Ewing describes it, “We actually went in to Detroit planning to on making “Detroit Hustles Harder,” a film focused on the revitalization of the city. Once we moved to Detroit in October 2012, however, it became clear that the story of Detroit is in many ways not one of the future but of people dealing with decisions made long ago. Detropia is a story of consequences: the realities of globalization, the price of short term thinking (by the big 3) and the real downside to unresolved racial tension. It also shines a light on those people who have chosen to stay in Detroit, to stick with the city and do their part. The pluck and grit they exhibit bring a sense of hope to the city.“

Ewing and Grady’s cameras achieve this by taking us along to frustrating union meetings, tense confrontations between the mayor and the public about his plans to “downsize” the city, long rides past abandoned auto plants, evenings spent with scrap metal scavengers, and the somewhat surreal existence of the artists homesteading in Detroit, who see it as their canvas and can afford to live there for $700 a month (rent can be as low as $250). For the viewer who does not come equipped with familiarity of Detroit’s condition, the movie may lack a coherent enough explanation of its intentions. But for the initiated, it is a beautioful and sad meditation on all of these issues.

There is much discussion in their film of the American middle class and whether it is dying, like the city that many believe gave birth to it. China serves as the bogeyman to many of the people in the film, most poignantly during scenes of the annual auto show where amid excitement over the unveiling of the Chevy Volt, we are quickly introduced to competition from a new Chinese model, significantly cheaper.

Looking at the landscape in the film, one wants to resist the allure of “ruin porn” that Detroit so easily provides. But it is hard to pretend not to see the beauty of the decay in the city – grand old Beaux Arts buildings sitting empty and overgrown, the history of the city lying around you. The beauty is sad but it is still beautiful.

Like Ewing, Mark Binelli also grew up in Detroit, and returned in 2009 to see the new highs and new lows for himself. The result of his two-and-a-half year long stay is a book that hits almost every issue, giving both the necessary stupefying numbers (in 2009, half of all children in Detroit lived in poverty and nearly half of all adults were functionally illiterate; the city regained its number one spot as America’s murder capital and was a leading contender for most arsons, to name a few) but also supplementing hard numbers with the actual problems as grappled with in real life and providing optimistic counterpoints.

In one chapter he introduces us to Mark Covington – a Detroit gardener who has gained much attention for his urban farming efforts. After losing his job in 2008, at age 37, Covington, out of sheer boredom, began to clean up and eventually cultivate the vacant land in his blighted neighborhood. Detroit is a leader in America in urban farming and according to long-time Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, the city has enough unused land to become the first entirely self-sufficient sustainable city in the world.

Of course, the DIY culture of Detroit extends to less utopian ends as well. So many city services have been cut so drastically and crime is so rampant that a near-anarchic state exists for many residents. In his chapter on civilian responses to crime, Binelli tags along with Rick Ector who runs a firearm academy and gives classes mandatory to obtaining a conceal and carry license. In one class, Ector asks his student,“ What if, a twelve year old with a shotgun in his pants rolls up on a bicycle? Would you have it in you to shoot him? If you are not prepared to shoot a twelve year old, you should not carry a handgun!”

Binelli gives incredibly well grounded and always engaging colorful accounts of all that ails Detroit and the myriad proposals for its survival. His book is empathic but also highly skeptical – the poverty, mostly incompetent political class, horrific but regular crime, lack of basic city services and weight of the city’s history appear to keep him from believing that Detroit can withstand these forces. His chapters about Detroit as a new creative capital are tinged with irony, and he rightfully remains skeptical of the idea that the creative class can save a city. And yet, he confesses to ultimately being seduced by the optimism of these new folks, who seem determined to stay, make Detroit their home and remake it into a new 21st century city that embraces its post-industrial fate.

Both the film and the book provide more than mere indulgence of morbid curiosity or scenes from the “last frontier.” As Binelli writes, “… it’s undeniable that Detroit feels like an extraordinary place, and at the same time, just as Greenland might be called ground zero of the broader climate crisis, Detroit feels like ground zero for…what, exactly? The end of the American way of life? Or the beginning of something else? Either way, that is why so many divergent interests are converging here right now. Who doesn’t want to see the future?”

Detroit’s problems are mostly particular to it and it may be unwise to read too much into its fate, but it serves as a strong cautionary tale for the new industrial capitals of the world and has emerged as a sort of canvas for possibiities for post-industrial, urban, America.

Back in the days of scheduled double-headers, some of the biggest draws in New York City baseball were the returns of the prodigal sons – the Dodgers and Giants, in town to face their still vastly inferior supposed reincarnation, the New York Mets. Shea, the new stadium in Queens, probably saw its first record-breaking crowds when the California teams came to town. My dad and his friends, baby-boomers all, were just old enough to have developed attachments to the Giants and Dodgers before they left for the West Coast (my dad was almost always the lone Giants fan, the rest thoroughly Brooklyn and thoroughly Dodgers, but now all united under the hybrid orange and blue Mets; I am eternally grateful that I can claim Willie Mays as part of my baseball heritage). Between trying to develop an attachment to the new team and still holding on to the old one (or in the case of most Dodger fans, cultivating deep bitterness), they attended many of the California-teams vs. Mets series in the mid-late 60’s.

On May 31st, 1964, on their way back from the Chava**, Ricky (the Giants fan), Donnie, Woody and Joey, decided to go straight from Port Authority to Flushing for that Sunday’s double-header against the Giants. The Giants took the first game 5-3. After a couple hours’ break, the two teams resumed play, fresh pitchers on the mound but also lots of increasingly tired fielders and batters. Tied at 6 in the ninth inning, my dad decided it was well past time to head back home to Rockaway – still a junior at Far Rockaway high school, he had some non-Socialist-Zionist homework to attend to, and a mother who probably preferred to see him before she went to sleep. The long journey back took him on the #7 into the city to Times Square to catch the #2 Downtown all the way to the Junction, the last stop in Brooklyn, where he’d only arrive to wait for his last leg, the Q35 down Flatbush and over the bridge (now actually officially called The Gil Hodges Bridge, but no one calls it that, it’s still the Marine Parkway Bridge). For all those out there for whom Rockaway is recently in the cross-hairs, just remember this journey – those of us who grew up in Rock lived sooo far from the rest of the world. It was pretty, but god it was far. Though now the pain comes on summer Sundays, when you have to leave Rockaway to return to the city. Funny how that happens.

After finally arriving in Rockaway, my dad ate dinner, did some studying for the Regents and then flicked on the TV to catch the game’s highlights on the 11PM news. The game was still on. This game, which finally ended in the 23rd inning, would be the Mets first extra-inning game at Shea and the longest doubleheader in history (the second game alone lasted 7 hours and 23 minutes).

Oh and the Mets did lose the second game too (despite a pretty impressive triple play in the 14th) . Still only 1964, 1969 was a universe away, the mere 5 years belying the actual gulf between the Mets’ first years and their Miracle Mets Word Series victory in ‘69 . After a recent 17 to 1 victory over the Cubs, Gary Cohen reminded the viewers of a favorite ’64 Mets legend. Back then if you wanted to find out the score of a game after it ended and before the next day’s paper, your best bet would be the sportsdesk at the local paper. Only a few days before the May 31 double-header, the Mets very uncharacteristically routed the Cubs with a final score of 19 to 1. As the story goes, a fan called a local New York paper to get the score. When he was told they scored 19 runs he paused for a good few second before asking: Did they win?

** The Chava (Hebrew for Farm) was a working farm in Hightstown, New Jersey, created in the early part of the century to prepare young socialist Zionists for their future life on a kibbutz. Among the many luminaries who supported the mission of the Chava and its ideological visions for Israel, was Albert Einstein, who lived and worked nearby in Princeton. Having declined the offer to become Israel’s first President (an honorary title mostly), Einstein was still very much invested in the new country’s future. Ricky, Woody, Donnie and Joey spent many weekeneds at the Chava throughout high school and after and would all, with the exception of Joey, eventually emigrate to Israel and live on Kibbutz Lahav.

And a new book about Father John Brooks, the 1960’s, Holy Cross and some of its first Black Alumni (Clarence Thomas and Ted Wells among them)

In one of his many “God & Religion: Good or Bad?” debates, Christopher Hitchens addressed the role of religion in the American civil rights movement in the 1960’s, certainly one of religion’s more admirable chapters. Hitchens pointed to Martin Luther King, Jr., and said, “Fortunately for us, he wasn’t really a Christian, because if he had followed the preachments in Exodus about the long march to freedom, he would have invoked the right that the Bible gives to take the land of others, to enslave other tribes…The people who actually organized the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph, were both secularists and socialists. The whole case for the emancipation of black America had already been made perfectly well by secularists.”

Perhaps, but it is an unrelenting belief in one’s own righteous cause that leads both the secular and religious to that kind of unyielding faith and fight they deem their cause requires. The kind of moral and intellectual tenacity that led Mr. Hitchens himself to propound and act on his myriad beliefs and causes (Hitchens’ moral god was far more infallible than many celestial gods of others, just look at his unwavering support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq despite the mounds of evidence showing how ill-conceived they were). Many models do exist wherein religious structures provide the kind of missionary advocacy necessary for effective action. Usually the key questions are what action, and to what end.

The history and tradition of the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church exemplify the possibilities for religious advocacy for progressive change. The work of the Jesuits is especially instructive since it is an exceptional and often-defiant part of a larger global faith that can be dangerously conservative and out of step with the day to day needs of its devout.

A new book by Diane Brady is a sort of unvarnished ode to the important work the Jesuits did during the civil rights era, and a reminder that religious advocacy and action belong equally to the left as to the right. In Fraternity, Diane Brady tells the story of the personal mission of Father John Brooks at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., a college Time magazine then dubbed the “Cradle of the Catholic Left.” From its beginnings in the mid-19th Century, Holy Cross proved a haven of elite scholarship for members of the population unwelcome elsewhere. As Brady recounts:

Among the first students to enroll at Holy Cross were four sons of Michael Morris Healy, an Irish-born planter in Georgia, and Eliza Clark, a mixed-race slave whom Healy owned and had fallen in love with. Their children were considered slaves, making them ineligible to attend school in the South. Instead, James, Patrick, Hugh and Sherwood Healy came to Holy Cross in 1844. The Healy boys did well – Patrick went on to become president of Georgetown University in 1874, James was valedictorian of the first graduating class in 1849 and later became the country’s first African American Catholic bishop, Michael became a celebrated sea captain, and Sherwood became a priest and rector of Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

The 1960’s presented somewhat different challenges than antebellum America though. Despite its earlier displays of integration, Holy Cross had evolved into an institution for the sons of the Irish Catholic well to do, quite removed from the hurly-burly of the decade. While many liberal intellectuals embraced the ideas of integration and change in the 1960’s in the abstract, Father Brooks was one of the few who felt it his personal duty to realize them. The history of the Healy boys certainly played a part in affirming his convictions that Holy Cross was the right place. The death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, deepened his belief that this was also the right time. The time to try and bring bright young black men to Holy Cross, the kind of men – boys really, at age 18 — that would survive and hopefully thrive as helmsmen of a new generation of radical change. Not a small amount of pressure, and quite a bit to ask of an 18 year old boy.

The title of the book, “Fraternity,” refers to the members of the first class Father Brooks recruited. It focuses on Ted Wells, Stan Grayson, Eddie Jenkins , Ed Jones and Clarence Thomas — in one graduating class, one of America’s top litigators, a New York City deputy mayor, a running back on the ’73 Miami Dolphins undefeated team and also subsequently a successful lawyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Supreme Court Justice, respectively.

As Diane Brady rightfully emphasizes, Brooks understood that recruitment was perhaps the easiest step. The greater burden lay on the recruited, in dealing with feelings of isolation in an alien environment, one filled with the incomprehension and latent racism of an otherwise homogeneous college community. Questions such as “Is it easier to get in here if you’re coloured?” and other less innocent-minded questions and comments were common. Father Brooks often could only act as a sort of spiritual and social facilitator for the black students who arrived on campus. The rest the students had to figure out on their own.

Through the accounts of their experiences over the next few years, one witnesses many of the merits and drawbacks of affirmative action as well all of the other issues playing on the minds of young, black, draft-aged men in the 60’s – Black Power, the War, the questioning of sacredly-held traditions. Perhaps most illustrative are the widely divergent experiences of Ted Wells and Clarence Thomas — the ones they arrived with at Holy Cross and the ones they carried away:

Wells, having grown up in a city (Washington, DC) that had become a mecca and marching ground for black pride, was looking for ways to recreate the sense of brotherhood at Holy Cross. Thomas had spent much of his life digesting racism on his own. He had learned to move easily in the white community, even if he never felt a part of it, and he didn’t have much interest in making skin color the prime factor in determining his social circle. Thomas wanted to be seen as someone who could fit in and get along with anybody. Let Wells revel in the black identity and push for civil rights. What bothered Thomas wasn’t being black; it was being noticed for being black.”

Thomas’ subsequent experience at Yale Law School only further embittered him towards affirmative action. And it famously informed his political outlook, which has tended to estrange him from civil rights causes, black institutions and the notion that black Americans should in any way view themselves or be viewed as different than anyone else. Ted Wells, on the other hand, embraced his role as a black American leader and role model. After doing graduate work at Harvard – earning both an MBA and a JD – he has, along with his accomplishments as a top litigator (his clients include Elliott Spitzer and Scooter Libby), served as counsel for the New Jersey NAACP, State Chair of the United Negro College Fund and Co-Chair of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Sometimes it does take a perfect storm. Father Brooks had arrived at Holy Cross fresh from Vatican II (1962-1965), which filled him, and many others, with a sense of purpose and urgency for social change, and a belief that the church should be at its forefront. He also had exactly the right combination of altruism, zeal, empathy, guidance and ability to know when to step back and let the black students stake out their places for themselves. Indeed, Clarence Thomas often looks back fondly at Holy Cross as a place and time where he was treated and appraised as a man, rather than a black man, mostly because of Father Brooks.

While Father Brooks is highly unique, he also seems to embody everything that is possible from a religious sect that values intellect, scholarship and a commitment to social advocacy. The Jesuit Order may be “gaying and graying,” as some insiders jokingly lament, but it also in many ways seems the way forward.

The ghost of Bobby Moore looms large over my family, our sort of patron saint of football. He certainly haunts the world of English football, representing England at its absolute dominant best, and at the same time painfully reminding England that it will never measure up to that again while expectations that it will unfortunately still remain. Hopefully this will eventually fade away – loss of empire seems to still only irk the BNP; English football glory needs to likewise gracefully fade into bittersweet nostalgia and pride in a rich history, not feed into current expectations for the national team (though maybe the masochism is part of the charm; for an explanation why native English talent is now in short supply, check out Soccernomics). But glorious it was, reaching its zenith in 1966, when the dynamic duo of Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst led the English side to victory when England hosted the World Cup. In the final match against Germany, perhaps one of the most memorable and amazing finals in sporting history, Geoff Hurst completed a hat-trick to bring home the cup.

But before the near-mythic victory of 1966, beginning in 1961, Bobby Moore & Geoff Hurst, along with the rest of the West Ham side, several English clubs such as Everton and Blackburn, and a few other domestic league clubs from around the world (amongst them: Kilmarnock from Scotland; Valenciennes, France; Dukla, Prague; Recife, Brazil and once even Petakh Tikvah from Israel), gathered annually for about 6 years, for a short international summer season at Randall’s Island.

My dad, aged 13, having just moved from Kingston, the small idyllic former NY capital up the Hudson, was now all of a sudden a city boy and quickly made use of this unprecedented sports bonanza New York had to offer. Further confirmation that maybe New York was the center of the world? He grew up a devout New York Giants fan, but after they moved to San Francisco in 1957, they left a vacuum, especially in summer – a huge hole where a burning passion for Willie Mays used to be. In stepped the golden boy Bobby Moore and West Ham United. Over the next few years, my dad, a natural athlete who excelled at baseball, basketball, (American) football and soccer, and a keen fan and observer of the sports he enjoyed, quickly absorbed the nuances of the Beautiful Game, especially the English game. One summer, after watching a West Ham and Liverpool match, and incensed by the Liverpool defense, he felt compelled to write a letter to the leading English football magazine. Unfortunately, he signed with his real name and address and consequently got loads of hate mail from Liverpool supporters. One such letter began, “Dear Candy-Eating American.”

Add to the magic of Bobby Moore the fact that the East End of London, where West Ham plays, once boasted London’s first real Jewish community, and the incorporation of West Ham United into my dad’s sports consciousness was sealed.

A few years later, when he decided to leave New York for a kibbutz, he took the long route and traveled a bit through Europe. While in England, he had a choice of either visiting Wales the next day, or attending the first division season opener – West Ham vs. Tottenham at White Hart Lane. It was a no-brainer, and to this day he laughs when he recalls the chants by Spurs supporters of “Bobby Moore is a thief.” After the match, standing on the platform for his train to head home, he watched as dozens of fellow West Ham supporters promptly began to thoroughly destroy the train specially chartered for their ride back to the East End . Lovely.

Unfortunately, West Ham supporters, like other footy fans, not starting out with all that much class to begin with, have worked diligently to earn probably the worst reputation for hooliganism in the UK. A few years ago I remember watching a match against Spurs (which are considered the “Jewish” team since they are from North London, where most London Jews ended up when they could get the hell out of the East End) and West Ham receiving a fine because many of its supporters enthusiastically chanted, “I’d rather be a Paki than a Jew.” Classy stuff.

Recently I finally watched the Hollywood movie about West Ham fanaticism, Green Street Hooligans. I resisted it for a long time because Elijah Wood played the lead and the thought of Frodo as any kind of footy fan made me cringe. But he was kind of perfect, playing a geeky, American, Harvard drop-out, in London visiting his sister and finding refuge with an especially rabid West Ham firm, its ring-leader played maybe too charmingly by Charlie Hunnam. You do have to suspend some disbelief while watching it to fully enjoy it – for instance I couldn’t tell whether their disdain for journalists (bloody journos!) had a basis in reality or was just a plot device, as in, if Frodo turned out to be one and infiltrated their ranks, it would have been worse than if he had been a narc. Much worse. However, after the News of the World fiasco, it is becoming easier and easier to fathom.

The movie ends with one of my favorite modern-day battle scenes and its harsh violence and tragic consequences are clearly heavy-handed morality tales, the story adapted from a book by a reformed hooligan who now devotes his life to ridding football of the scourge of football partisan violence. No matter, it’s still enjoyable.

Born into a family that takes sports and its history rather importantly, to put it mildly, relating to others through sports comes naturally. Especially when I have spent time abroad, football/soccer is a wonderful and natural lingua franca, and as a girl who knows about it, it’s almost been like a cool party trick – especially with all the Brits I seemed to encounter during my travels. And for any real sports enthusiast, having a team with a genuine connection to makes the sport more fun and engaging.

My independently found love for the game (and the natural adoption of West Ham as an entryway into it) reignited my father’s interest in the English league and after I returned to the States we would frequently go to Nevada Smith’s to watch matches. We’d invariably be the only West Ham supporters there – there are lots of Chelsea, Man U, Liverpool and Spurs fans around, but the East End is not especially well represented here. There was one exception, every time at Nevada Smith’s we would run into the one other Hammers supporter – straight out of central casting – full-on cockney accent, missing teeth – to this day we wonder how and why this man ended up in New York (though I think he was possibly more fascinated with us and how exactly two New York Jews ended up being West Ham fans – he was always friendly and seemed genuinely excited to have someone to talk Hammers to, but he also looked at us a little strangely, squinting like he couldn’t see us well – it was a mutually felt dilemma apparently).

The frenzy over the World Cup last summer seemed to consolidate an American base for the game, reflected in the consistently solid popularity of the current incarnation of a professional American soccer league. It was kind of thrilling to have to get to a bar early last summer to ensure seating for a match – I should be embarrassed to admit that I arrived at Soda at 9AM, before management, the day of England-USA, which was on at 3PM. You can’t be too careful! And they ended with a draw – so definitely worth it for gloating rights alone. Poor England.

Several bars rightfully exploited the new popularity of the sport, and branded themselves as soccer bars. This includes one bar in my neighborhood. Woodwork, which opened in January of 2010, really fully entrenched itself last summer as a soccer bar with the Cup, and continues to draw patrons eager to watch whatever tournament or season match is on.

However, it at least originally also televised other sports – I certainly remember watching the great America vs. Canada Olympic hockey match (full house that day) and March Madness games, though I always sensed some kind of disconnect between the patrons and some of the bartenders – while watching the NCAA tournament, our bartender not only started degrading college basketball and the tournament, in one fell swoop he dismissed all team sports. Err…this is a sports bar right? I haven’t seen him since though, maybe they figured out he was not the best suited? But there is definitely a tension in the bar’s identity, trying to balance its appeal to a particular type of Brooklyn patron, and on the other its draw as a sports bar. However, more and more, the bar does not cater to the average sports fan at all and I have never felt completely as comfortable in it as I have in my past local sports bar homes, such as Nevada Smiths, or Champs in Montreal, which was around the corner from my apartment and where I spent many evenings watching the Knicks in the late 90’s, when they were good. I distinctly remember friends stopping by to say hi and thinking it would be very funny to root for the Pacers.

Woodwork is a sports bar for the newer Brooklyn – the menu has a foodie’s stamp of approval and the patrons are definitely the newer residents in the neighborhood. Which in itself is fine. However, part of the beauty of watching sports at a bar, with other people, is the collective enjoyment and participation, and the egalitarianism that immediately sets the tone, trumping any pretenses once the talk turns to sports.

However, it appears that the popularity of soccer/football has entered the realm of “cool” and many folks who are not otherwise sports fans, but who love living in Brooklyn and tend to privilege “good taste” above all else to set themselves apart (I won’t use the “H” word; it really should just be retired already) have appropriated soccer as a badge of (pseudo) sophistication and worldliness.

A few Fridays ago, when the Mets and Yankees played Game 1 of their annual 4th of July Subway Series, I headed to Woodwork to watch – who in New York wants to watch that alone? I aimed to get there early to ensure a seat. I needn’t have worried, my friend Liz and I were the only ones there to watch the game! In New York City! That in itself was a bit dismaying, and really just puzzling. I actually had to ask the bartender to turn on the game, on one particular TV in a section where no one else was sitting (the other 4 TV’s showed Argentina vs. Bolivia). I overheard someone asking when they would turn on the Argentina/Bolivia match and the bartender explained that “Those girls are watching the baseball game.” Before this patron moved on to a different seat in front of a TV with the match (exactly 2 feet away), he approached me and asked what inning it was. Innocently, thinking he cared, I told him bottom of the 4th. Only then did I realize he just wanted to point out that he’d like for the game to be over so he could watch soccer. Liz persuaded me not to go over and tell him what I thought of this, like I really wanted to. But it left me so disappointed and a little angry.

The beauty of enjoying sports, and the reason so many, including myself, find refuge in them, is because it is so very far away from the judgmentalism of what it means to be cool and sophisticated. Everyone can belong, it is not an exclusive club. You might have serious one-upmanship about knowledge about teams or the sport, but it is never about judging another person’s worth and it is almost always driven by a real and pure enthusiasm that cannot be faked.

To sit in a bar in New York and have someone act dismissively because I would prefer to watch the two New York baseball teams play each other plays on all my worst stereotypes of why some people move to Brooklyn or New York these days. I try not to ever even let my mind wander in that direction and generally enjoy all the new businesses opening up in my neighborhood (except for the Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe; really, in my zoning utopia that named would never be allowed) and welcome the good food and community atmosphere, but the soccer snobs make some new patterns hard to ignore. Bobby Moore would not approve.

Sports fans are by nature a superstitious and circumspect lot, but the Met fan has a cultivated cynicism that at this point is hard to match. The play that took out two of the Mets best and most popular players – Ike Davis and David Wright – pretty much sums up the season – a little league moment when an infield pop-up caused Wright and Davis to collide. They have now both been out for almost two months. Many head-shaking and major-league-rare moments like this have followed, including what should have been a double-play to end an inning a few nights ago against the Tigers, if Tejada and Turner hadn’t been confused about whose job it was to cover 2nd — they both ended up awkwardly standing on the same bag at the same time looking a bit lost. And their ragtag troupe of young players, like the improved but still somewhat shaky catcher Josh Thole (recently a friend asked a bunch of us what new record we might see broken. I mused that Thole might set one for most passed balls at home plate; but that was a while ago, he’s been ok lately); and the up and comers Justin Turner and Daniel Murphy have been adding to this minor league atmosphere but also showing flashes of brilliance. Flashes. You never forget what is going on between the watchable exciting moments. What the real storyline is. The second Jason Bay comes up to bat, reality hits back hard.

As any baseball fan, and now any New Yorker reader now also knows from Jeffrey Toobin’s exceptionally informative and painful article, financial difficulty and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme also define this season. Fred Wilpon, the Mets’ rather annoyingly candid owner, is in the cross-hairs of Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee appointed to handle the Madoff fallout. This has already led to the sale of part of the team and will undoubtedly affect whether or not the most valuable players will remain in Mets uniform – Reyes, Beltran and K-Rod might be worth too much to keep on a team that is not in contention (but what if the Mets find themselves in the wild card race? A lot for Sandy Alderson et al to think about. A lot of bad decisions to look forward to).

So ultimately, this Mets season, at the moment hovering just above .500, is about enjoying the pleasant surprises of individual talents – especially those of Jose Reyes. And the Mets’ recent 52 run/4 game spree just baffles a fan even more – definitely the most manic depressive team in baseball; it’s hard to live with that kind of volatility.

All this leaves a real baseball fan craving & needing more. Some play fantasy baseball. Others fill the void by complaining, whining, hating on the Yankees and Phillies, and obsessing over the flawed stewardship of the Wilpons. My wandering eye almost invariably leads me to the fullness of baseball that really only books can provide.

A few weeks ago at the Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street in Fort Greene, Leonard Cassuto, editor of the new Cambridge Companion to Baseball, and Caryn Rose, of Metsgrrl.com, chatted about this tension between the game as observed by the curious and detached and the game as lived daily by the individual, the more often than not frustrated fan. The two embodied their two worlds perfectly – Cassuto, an English professor at Fordham, speaking in calm measured tones about the more “interesting” aspects of the game and how it figures in the larger fabric of American culture; Rose with a fan’s embittered tone, cursing the Wilpons under her breath and speaking with her inherited bile of being spurned by Walter O’Malley (her father was a Dodgers fan).

For Rose it is all very visceral, for Cassuto it is not. Which is just as well since Cassuto has provided a valuable service with the Cambridge Companion, which starts with a detailed timeline of baseball and follows with various essays that range from baseball in film, baseball and the color line, how one compares the measure of greatness in baseball vs. other things like literature and a great chapter about baseball and the American city. All this is done in a very manageable 200 pages, no small feat for what may become one of the most useful & handy guides to the game. It is hard to imagine there is much to add to the immense canon of baseball literature but what separates this collection of essays from almost everything else before is that it is a purely observational and sociological account. Almost all else out there is written for fans and aficianados by journalists and other insiders. The Cambridge Companion is geared towards those generally interested in American culture and how baseball both defines it and is defined through it. For a fan it takes some getting used to and reads as if it were written for someone who is BSL (Baseball as a Second Language). Most other baseball books, even the most cynical ones, take you along for the ride and add to the mythic grandeur of the game, they speak your language. But to the baseball fan there is never enough new information and Cassuto makes sure to also keep some of the magic intact with inter-chapters, like the ones about Babe Ruth and Roberto Clemente, both of whom generated the real kind of super-star tales that defy any fiction-writer’s imagination.

Both Cassuto and Rose are serious music fans and when Rose is not writing about baseball, she is most likely writing about rock. She wrote a recent post about the passing of Clarence Clemons and turns out both she and Cassuto are devoted Springsteen fans. The two tried to compare and define the happiness of being a music fan and the happiness of being a baseball fan. This left me a little confused. Music can bring one such unadulterated joy. There may be some disappointments, as in bad albums or bad shows. But rarely does it drag you through a half year of personal drama and break your heart, year after year. To use the word “happiness” to describe following sports at all does not seem appropriate (except the day you win the World Series). But it is something more, it is fuller, a bit more like life, but because it is ultimately not real life, it can serve as a unique cathartic release from it.